Abstract
In 1978 Thomas Hahn published an article on “The Indian Tradition in Western Medieval Intellectual History” in which he identified statements about Indian “sages” found in Christian literature written from the third through the fourteenth centuries. He demonstrated that the image of Brahmans (or Gymnosophists) changed during this period from one of misguided ascetics, as in Augustine’s City of God, to a widespread medieval view of them as philosophers who acquired wisdom, devotion, and virtue without need of Christian revelation. Hahn argued that this final image recurs so widely as to constitute “a unified tradition of thought about these virtuous Indians.”1
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Notes
Thomas Hahn, “The Indian Tradition in Western Medieval Intellectual History,” Viator 9 (1978): 213–34. City of God, Book 15, Chap. 20.
To list only a few: Ashok Kumar Srivastava, India as Described by the Arab Travelers (Buxipur: Sahitya Sansar Prakashan, 1967); Ram Kumar Chaube, India as Told by the Muslims (Varanasi: Prithivi Prakashan, 1969); S. Muhammed Husayn Nainar, Arab Geographers’ Knowledge of Southern India (Madras: University of Madras, 1942); H. M. Elliot and John Dowson, The History of India as Told by its Own Historians, 8 vols. (Delhi: D. K. Publishers, 1867–1877, reprint 1996).
Bruce Lawrence, Shahrastani on the Indian Religions (The Hague: Mouton, 1976).
Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988).
Walter J. Fischel, “India, Early Phase,” Encyclopedia Judaica (EJ) 8 (1972):1349–51. He mentions al-Qirqisani and Daniel al-Qumisi. See also a good review of references to India, though not to Hindus, in the Bible, Josephus, the Talmud, and Geonic responsa, in L. Rabinowitz, Jewish Merchant Adventurers: A Study of the Radanites (London: E. Goldston, 1948), ch. 5.
Hananya Goodman, “Introduction: Judaism and Hinduism: Cultural Resonances,” in Between Jerusalem and Benares (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), 5–6, 270 n.6, 280 n. 60 (on “resonance”) Leopold Zunz, the great nineteenth century historian, identified, without analysis, a large number of references to India in his essay, “On the Geographical Literature of the Jews from the Remotest Time to 1841,” appended to Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, ed. and trans. A. Asher (New York: Hakeshet Pub. Co., originally published in 1841), vol. 2.
Ya’aqub al-Qirqisani, Kitab al-Anwar Wal-Maraqib, 2 vols. ed. Leon Nemoy (New York: Kohut Memorial Foundation, 1941), see Nemoy’s index, vol. 2, 55 and 62. I note here the same description of Barahima which appeared in a book of a later Karaite, Aaron ben Elijah of Nicomedia, who wrote Ets Hayyim in the fourteenth century. See Isaac Husik, A History of Medieval Jewish Philosophy (New York: Athenaeum, 1969), 380.
Quoted in Sarah Stroumsa, “The Barahima in Early Kalam,” JSAI 6 (1985): 234. See also Georges Vajda, “La prophetologie de Dawud Ibn Marwan al-Raqqi al-Muqammis, theologien juif arabophone du IXe siecle,” JournalAsiatic, 265.3/4 (1977): 227–35.
Saadya Gaon, Amanat wa-al-rtiqadat Section 3, 9. For translation, see The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, trans. Samuel Rosenblatt (New Haven: Yale University, 1948), 172.
Morris Epstein, ed. and trans., Tales of Sindebar. Mishle Sindabar (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1967), 3–18; Yosef Dan, “Hebrew Fiction,” EJ 6 (1972):1266.
Joseph Derenbourg, ed. Deux versions hébraiques du livreKalilah etDimnah la premiere accompagnee d’une traduction franlaise (Paris: F. Vieweg, 1881), 312. See also 313–15.
Israel J. Kazis, ed. and trans. The Book of the Gests of Alexander of Macedon (Cambridge: Medieval Academy of America, 1962); Yosippon, ed. with intro. David Flusser ( Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1981); Wout Jac. van Bekkum, “Medieval Hebrew Versions of the Alexander Romance,” Medieval Antiquity 24 (1995): 293–302, and “Alexander the Great in Medieval Hebrew Literature,”Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 49 (1986): 218–26; Steven Bowman, “Alexander and the Mysteries of India,” Journal of Indo-Judaic Studies 1.2 (1999): 71–111.
Jean Sedlar, India and theGreekWorld (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980).
For the idea of extremes, see Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), esp. ch. 2, “The Fabulous East: ‘Wonder Books’ and Grotesque Facts.”
E. Ullendorf and C. F. Beckingham, The Hebrew Letters of Prester John (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). Meir Bar-Ilan, “Prester John: Fiction and History,” History of European Ideas 20.1–3 (1995): 291–98.
A. Asher, trans. and ed., The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, 2 vols. (New York: Hakesheth, 1900). Marcus Nathan Adler, trans. and comm., The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela (New York: Philip Feldman, 1907). Michael Signer, introduction to The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela: Travels in the Middle Ages (Malibu: Joseph Simon Publisher, 1983).
H. G. Reissner, “Benjamin of Tudela on Ceylon,” Zeitschrifte fur Religions-und Geistesgeschichte 6 (1954): 151–55. Specifically, he discussed the identity of Ibng, the term dukhbin (he thinks that Benjamin used the term for any kind of non-monotheist, including the Druzes), and the meanings of bamah and elohuta. Notice, however, that the Hebrew dorziin appears only in the A version of Benjamin’s text, the other versions (containing donivayun and dugbin) differing greatly from Benjamin’s word for Druzes: krazi’an (and drazinin, dorzi’in, rogi’an in other versions): see Hebrew text in Adler, The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, 20, 59. Samuel Krauss in an article published in 1937 argues that the ‘ovdei ha-esh, the fire-worshipers, of Ibng are Parsis (“Or hadash al eilu yedi’ot ge’ografiyot ‘etzel eldad ha-dani uvinyamin mi-tudela,” Tarbitz, 8:208–32).
Raphael Patai, The Jewish Alchemists: A History and Source Book (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 310. Patai stated the manuscript’s date generally as “Jewish Scholars in the Late Middle Ages” (313).
Ibid., 217.
Ibid., 131. The book was published in 1541 but was composed earlier in Hebrew (see 125–26).
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Marks, R.G. (2007). Hindus and Hinduism in Medieval Jewish Literature. In: Katz, N., Chakravarti, R., Sinha, B.M., Weil, S. (eds) Indo-Judaic Studies in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230603622_4
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